New media phenomenon Andrew Breitbart likes to call his sites Big This or Big That — BigJournalism being the most famous, along with BigHollywood and BigGovernment. He should have titled his latest book “Big Truths,” for that is what he ladles out with gusto. Breitbart homes in on absolute truths largely absent in popular culture.
Or he could have named the book “Big Lies,” for the falsehoods that many in the mainstream media have been telling us for years — that they’re objective and nonpartisan, for example. Breitbart relishes calling those out.
In the end, the book was titled “Righteous Indignation, Excuse Me While I Save the World” (Grand Publishing; $27.99), fitting for a work not shy about the writer’s anger at how America’s narrative is being told.
Those of us who like how Breitbart uses new media to taunt the cultural behemoths that have tried to police our thoughts for years, will discover a call to action in 258 readable pages.
Notice I didn’t say “packed pages.” Righteous Indignation does meander a bit. Did we need to read about Breitbart’s alcohol- and gambling-fueled years at Tulane? I’m not sure.
But such occasional rambling doesn’t make the book drag. It is, after all, if not a beach book, at least a book that came out in summer.
And “Righteous Indignation” does zero in on its targets early on and stays on them throughout. The main three are the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood (the Three Horsemen of the Left’s Apocalypse), which he cudgels mercilessly. Breitbart understands that all three are intertwined, forming a cultural beehive he calls “The Complex.”
“America is in the middle of a media war,” he states on page 3. And he doesn’t let up thereafter: “Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television. For decades the left understood the importance of education, art and messaging.”
Breitbart is right, of course, and his “Big” sites are designed to change this state of affairs. He’s made it his life’s mission to show that at least one conservative gets it.
He rightly intuited, as we did at the Heritage Foundation, that the Internet provides us with the right tools to start regaining the message. This is partly because the Internet, which allows conservatives to bypass the left’s chokehold on the newsroom, mocks the very idea of “gatekeepers.” But it’s also because of the Internet’s nature.
The Internet, after all, is the antithesis of the central planning that has become the hallmark of the Obama era. It is individualistic, moved by the invisible hand of millions of separate decisions.
It speaks to the very essence of what unfettered free markets are about. That’s why old-time liberals, especially those who once trusted the newsroom to be the command center of the Complex, whine so much about it.
But how was the left able to take over the Complex? It is here that the book is at its best. In a must-read chapter called “Breakthrough,” Breitbart maintains that it was a methodical invasion, naked to the untrained eye perhaps, but purposeful nonetheless.
He traces the origins to the enthrallment of European intellectuals with Marxism at the turn of the last century, and how they realized, as Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs put it, that “a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of the new ones by the revolutionaries.”
These ideas, Breitbart points out, migrated to America in the addled brains of disgruntled European academics who fled fascism. But rather than be grateful to their saviors, they tried to do the same thing here: Destroy America so they could put their blueprint into action.
All pillars had to be taken down, as one of the most famous thinkers in this so-called Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, wrote: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society.”
These people had an outsized influence on Americans such as Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers (to randomly pick two names) and countless academics and journalists.
Their thinking begat the questioning and spurning of all American values, whether religious, patriotic or economic, which we see daily on our TVs, on the front pages of many of our newspapers, and in our university classrooms.
Over the top? Read it and see for yourself. It’s a frightening picture. Good thing Breitbart’s around to serve as the new media cop on the beat, fighting to free us from this future.
Michael Gonzalez is vice president for communications at the Heritage Foundation.
